15/05/2026
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1381262060712982&set=a.339862818186250
Commentary from BAYAN International Officer Prof. Sarah Raymundo (May 13, 2026):
What is unfolding in the Senate is not merely political theater. It is the exposed machinery of elite impunity. Senators closing ranks to protect Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the very architect and loudest enforcer of Oplan Tokhang, reveals how deeply embedded the climate of state violence remains inside Philippine institutions.
Dela Rosa was never subtle about the drug war. During the Duterte years, he openly celebrated Tokhang as a brutal instrument of “peace and order.” He repeatedly defended killings as necessary collateral in the war on drugs and even acknowledged that Duterte’s own Senate testimonies could incriminate him regarding the Davao Death Squad and drug war operations.
The entire country remembers how officials normalized language like “nanlaban,” how police narratives were accepted almost automatically, and how thousands of urban poor Filipinos ended up dead while the masterminds stood behind podiums joking, boasting, and campaigning on bloodshed.
Now the same political class suddenly discovers “due process” when one of their own faces accountability before the ICC. The hypocrisy is staggering. For years, families of drug war victims begged for investigations, pleaded before courts, marched in the streets, and buried their dead without justice. Human rights groups documented patterns of executions, fabricated police reports, and systematic targeting of poor communities. Yet accountability moved at a glacial pace. The state demanded endless proof from grieving families even as evidence accumulated internationally. The ICC case itself emerged precisely because domestic institutions failed to act decisively.
But compare that to incidents like the Toboso killings in Negros Occidental.
In the Toboso case, the AFP immediately framed the dead as armed rebels after the military operation, while families, rights groups, and independent observers disputed the narrative and identified several victims as civilians, including students, organizers, and a journalist. Before any transparent, independent investigation could fully unfold, official institutions were already leaning toward the assumption that those killed were legitimate combatants. That is the pattern activists have criticized for decades: when the victims are poor, activists, peasants, indigenous people, or alleged leftists, the burden of proof shifts entirely onto the dead.
This double standard is a serious issue. When allegations involve state officials, generals, senators, or political dynasties, the language becomes cautious: “due process,” “sovereignty,” “jurisdiction,” “respect institutions.” But when civilians are killed in counterinsurgency operations, the presumption of innocence disappears overnight. Red-tagging substitutes for evidence. Military press releases become accepted truth. Calls for investigation are branded as subversive sympathy.
That contradiction fuels public anger toward Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Marcos Jr. is politically opportunistic and fundamentally incapable of dismantling the structures of impunity inherited from both the Duterte and older authoritarian eras such as his very own father. “Marcos inutil!” is a condemnation of a government that projects democratic normalcy while failing to confront massive corruption, militarization, landlessness, political dynasties, and extrajudicial violence in any meaningful structural way.
Justice in the Philippines often moves according to social hierarchy. The poor are criminalized instantly. Activists are surveilled instantly. Farmers are tagged instantly. But the politically connected can delay accountability for years through institutional protection, Senate alliances, legal technicalities, and elite negotiation.
This situation clearly shows that struggle is not only about one senator or one massacre. It is also about dismantling a political system where state violence is normalized against the marginalized while immunity is preserved for those who command the machinery of force.
(Photo from Bilyonaryo News Channel)
